ERIC ZUESSE -- How Michael Bloomberg’s ‘Journalists’ Propagandize for More U.S. Aggressions

How Michael Bloomberg’s ‘Journalists’ Propagandize for More U.S. Aggressions

Eric Zuesse

 

January 21, 2020

© Photo: Wikipedia

This will be exposing typical U.S.-regime propaganda. That’s propaganda favoring U.S. imperialism, which actually violates the intentions of America’s Founders, and the spirit of the U.S. Constitution.

The U.S. regime’s propaganda doesn’t come from the Government directly, but instead from the 607 billionaires who control the regime, via their corrupt control over the successful politicians (in both Parties), financing their careers, and by their owning (and otherwise controlling) the regime’s ‘news’-media, which are privately owned and which carry the same propaganda as the Government’s ‘publicly owned’ ‘news’-media do — all of America’s mainstream ‘news’-media being in favor of the U.S. Government’s sanctioning (economic-blockading) and trying to overthrow by means of coup or sometimes outright invasion, countries (such as Iraq, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Libya, etc.) that had never invaded, nor even threatened to invade, the United States. U.S. imperialism is commonly called “neoconservatism,” but it is basically the same as other imperialistic regimes throughout history — it is controlled by the given invading nation’s aristocracy, which deceives in its propaganda regarding the reasons why “regime change” is supposedly needed in the targeted countries. By means of these lies, the nation’s public are made willing to fund these invasions in their taxes and can even think that it is their patriotic duty, instead of being a massively criminal enterprise that they’ve been fooled into supporting with their dollars and sometimes with their very bodies.

First here will be essential historical background, in order for a reader to be able to understand typical U.S.-and-allied propaganda; and, then, will come a typical example which displays the results of that history and which thereby exposes the crucially implicit lies in that propaganda, and which cause it to be effective propaganda — the sort of deceits that fool most of the public into favoring these invasions and other international aggressions, which aggressions routinely produce mass-murders, benefitting only the aggressor-nation’s aristocracy and the aristocracies that are allied with them. This is the way that wealth in the U.S. has come to be so extremely narrowly held, so that, for example, a January 2018 study done for Deutsche Bank, “US Income and Wealth Inequality”, reported (p. 9) that “US: Top 0.1% owns as many assets as the bottom 90%”, and (p. 11) that, out of all the 34 OECD nations, America has the most unequal incomes — the most extreme inequality, of them all. The billionaires and their agents say that this is okay because, as the wealthy economist Lawrence Summers once put it, “we should accept inequality of results, recognizing that those who earn more are in a better position to contribute more to support society.” (In other words: poor people are less worthy than rich people are. Rich people tend to believe that, and to reward economists such as Summer for teaching that. It’s essential to their propaganda — and they fool especially themselves into believing it.)

The example to be dissected here will be from Wall Street’s Michael Bloomberg. Though he doesn’t deceive the public more than other billionaires do, he is running to become America’s President in order to replace another deceptive billionaire, Donald Trump, and so his ‘news’-operation provides a typical example of the mendacity of America’s mainstream (that’s to say, its billionaire-controlled) ‘journalism’ (virtually everything concerning international relations in U.S.-and-allied ‘journalism’ is propaganda: written so as to deceive). In Bloomberg’s case, the medium isn’t merely billionaire-controlled; it is billionaire-owned, just like Jeff Bezos’s Washington Postis. Washington DC and NYC both get their ‘news’ from such highly compromised, billionaires-owned-and-controlled, ‘news’-media, as these. America’s broadcast media then spread that ‘news’, nationally, and internationally.

The individuals who report ‘news’ at a ‘news’-medium such as Bloomberg ‘News’, do what the operation’s owners and its advertisers want them to do, which is to propagandize for their aristocracy — their own and allied billionaires’ corporations’ expansion so as to extend their empire into more countries and push aside the local aristocracy there, and, in this way, to concentrate the world’s wealth into their own and allied corporations. An expansionist or “imperialistic” aristocracy’s goals are analogous to gangland operations, except that an aristocracy writes and enforces the laws, instead of merely violates the laws (as gangland-operations do). It creates laws within its own nation, and it creates laws also internationally via alliances and treaties, and it uses alliances and treaties against ‘enemies’, such as the military alliance and treaty organization NATO, in order to pump increased sales of their own nation’s corporations’ weaponry (such as from Raytheon Corporation), and it also uses those international laws via sanctions and secondary sanctions, which can become the preliminary phase of an outright military invasion of the targeted country after finally declaring the nation to be an ‘enemy’ and thus ‘acceptable’ to invade and take over, for ‘us’ against ‘them’. (For example: Trump is outright refusing the demand by Iraq’s sovereign Government for all U.S. forces to leave.) Mere gangsters cannot do any such things, and so they are much more under the gun than “banksters” (aristocrats and their agents) are.

Controlling the ‘news’-media is essential to any expansionist aristocracy’s operations. No empire can be achieved or maintained without deceiving the nation’s public, who must pay the taxes and sometimes supply the corpses to build and increase the aristocracy’s empire.

This is the difference between imperialistic operations versus organized-crime operations. Organized crime is lower-class because it doesn’t control the government, but, when the anti-organized-crime Kennedy brothers were briefly in power in the U.S., organized crime did at least provide crucial assistance to eliminating the Kennedys; and, in that sense, organized crime was itself part of America’s Establishment, at least at that time. Furthermore, as Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair documented in their classic 1998 WHITEOUT: The CIA, Drugs and the Press (p. 134), “From the moment of its inception, the CIA held to the same policies of its progenitors in keeping gangster organizations in business. By 1947 the Agency was backing heroin producers in Marseilles, Burma, Lebanon, and western Sicily.” Organized crime is often essential to the CIA’s “Special Operations.” Organizations such as the Mafia are valuable assets of the CIA. They are experts at getting things done secretly. And such operations are less likely than any other to ever be exposed as having been CIA operations. Organized crime is thus a terrific asset to international intelligence agencies — especially to America’s CIA, which promotes itself as representing a ‘democracy’, even though it represents, instead, a fascist-imperialist regime.

Two years before the CIA got into protecting the heroin trade, U.S. President Harry S. Truman was, on 26 July 1945, persuaded by his top general, Dwight David Eisenhower (hypocritical inventor of the PR phrase he used against the Establishment — which he actually always supported — “military-industrial complex”) that if the United States wouldn’t conquer the Soviet Union, then the Soviet Union would conquer the United States, and so the suckered-by-Eisenhower Truman launched the Cold War on that date; and, on that basis, he turned America’s most essential WW II ally, the Soviet Union, into an enemy, and the Cold War secretly remains U.S. policy till this very day. (This was exactly the opposite of what Truman’s immediate predecessor, FDR, had intended.) The strategy, after U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush (on 24 February 1990) secretly ordered America’s leading vassals to continue the Cold War on the U.S.-and-allied side after the Soviet Union and its communism and their Warsaw-Pact mirror to America’s NATO would all end the following year, has been to surround Russia with enemies (Russia-allied countries that would be flipped to become U.S.-allied countries, by means of CIA subversion, coups, etc.), with the aim being ultimately to go in and conquer Russia. This plan requires a massive amount of propaganda, but it has been very successful, in ousting Russia-friendly governments such as in Yugoslavia in 1991-99, Iraq 2003, Libya 2011, and Ukraine 2014, though not yet achieving its final destination, winning World War III (WW-III) by grabbing control over Russia itself.

The first CIA coup (these coups were done by their “Special Operations” division) was in Thailand in the second year of the CIA’s existence, 1948, and it was done in order to take over the opium-heroin trade in southeast Asia (including Burma — now Myanmar) and to use it for providing essential off-the-books finance to the CIA in order for the CIA to do its part of the job of conquering Russia, “Special Operations.” As WHITEOUT (p. 136) put it:

This was the modus operandi of the CIA for the next fifty years. Though Truman was pressing for the secret operations [Special Operations], his signature was on no compromising document. The authority for the operations was given by the National Security Council. There was no congressional appropriation, so funding came from private sources inside the U.S., through a network of proprietary front organizations, millionaires, and criminal enterprises.

That was how the “The Buck Stops Here” President, Truman, actually functioned. (Similarly, Hitler’s “signature was on no compromising document” about the Holocaust, but, as I documented in my own 2000 WHY the Holocaust Happened, Hitler was the individual who ordered it — that was an executive action from the very top. It wasn’t any truer that Truman was a ‘weak dictator’ than that Hitler, whom some Hitler-supporters label with that phrase, was. However, there were important differences between them: Truman’s impact turned out to shape subsequent history even more than Hitler’s impact did. And, whereas Truman’s vastly harmful impact resulted from his being the Deep State’s fool and thus his starting the Cold War on 26 July 1945, Hitler’s vastly harmful impact was from his own, very private and longstanding, personal and always secret obsession against “blood-poisoning” of pureblooded Christians or “Aryans,” by Jews, which had started obsessing him in him in 1919, twenty years before the war to impose this exterminationist goal upon the the entire world became publicly unveiled — a war that he partly lost when WW II ended, whereas Truman’s war already partly won in 1991, and continues on even now, with the U.S. regime still planning to go in for the final kill, if and when it ever can.)

WHITEOUT also noted (p. 138) that,

CIA officer Miles Copeland wrote twenty-five years later that had it not been for the Mafia the Communists would have been in control of Italy, so crucial had the criminal organization been in murdering labor organizers and terrorizing the political process.

Furthermore,

The CIA’s financing mechanisms for these abuses of its charter came in the form of large subventions from American businessmen among whom Allen Dulles and Forrestal passed the hat at New York’s Brook Club, getting contributions from fearful millionaires such as …

And (p. 225),

General Phao had been made director of Thailand’s national police after the CIA-backed coup of 1948 led by Major General Phin Choohannan. Phao’s 40,000-member police force, the Police Knights, immediately engaged in a campaign of assassinations of Phin and Phao’s political enemies. These troops also assumed control of Thailand’s lucrative opium trade. … Phao’s control of the opium trade was directly abetted by the CIA, which had funnelled him $35 million in aid. Thailand would thereafter become the CIA’s main base of operations in the region.

In the 1950s the CIA backed General Phao in a struggle with another Thai general for monopoly of control of Thailand’s opium and heroin trade…Backed by squads of CIA advisers, Phao set about the task of turning Thailand into a police state. The country’s leading dissidents and academics were jailed. … Phao also cornered the country’s gold market, played a leading role on the top twenty corporate boards in the country, charged leading executives and businessmen protection fees and ran prostitution houses and gambling dens. Phao became great friends with Bill Donovan, at that time U.S. ambassador to Thailand.

So: that was the CIA’s first coup, and it happened in 1948, to Thailand: this operation was aimed at reducing the amount of off-the-books funds for U.S. intelligence “Special Operations” that needed to come from America’s aristocrats. Such Special Operations are crucial to the illegal, treasonous (anti-Constitutional), control over the U.S. Government, by the Deep State (the aristocrats — America’s hundreds of billionaires who finance the bulk of successful political campaigns for federal office; these are the individuals who determine who will and who won’t be able to become a serious contender for Congress, the Presidency, and judgeships). Not all of the money to fund Special Operations comes from the billionaires. An unknown percentage of it comes also from organized criminals — violators of laws, instead of writers of laws. America’s billionaires (via their paid agents, including gangsters) are the ones who write the laws. Organized criminals aren’t that powerful, because they can only violate the laws. And when a gangster serves a billionaire, only the billionaire is standing above the law.

—

This is essential historical context in order to be able to interpret accurately the 26 December 2019 Bloomberg ‘News’ article, “Putin’s Grand Gas Project Makes Sense Now”, by “Opinion” writer Leonid Bershidsky.

Here, now, in bold italics, are the especially relevant excerpts from it which indicate Bloomberg’s publication of propaganda that’s against Russia, and for isolating Russia by overthrowing governments which (like Saddam Hussein’s, Muammar Gaddafi’s, Viktor Yanukovych’s, Bashar Assad’s, Nicolás Maduro’s, and Evo Morales’s) had (or have) friendly relations with Russia:

It’s been reported in Ukraine that Russia might resume direct supplies of gas for Ukraine’s own needs — something unthinkable under former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s government, when Ukraine was buying Russian gas in the EU rather than deal with the invader of Crimea.

This ignores that by no later than June of 2013, the U.S. regime was already at the early implementation stage of its planned take-over not only of all of Ukraine but especially of Russia’s largest naval base, which since 1783 has been and still remains in Crimea (which from 1954 to 2014 was part of Ukraine). That was to become yet another U.S. naval base. This coup was already in the planning stage by no later than June of 2011. So: that Bloomberg-published phrase “the invader of Crimea” belongs actually to Obama, instead of to Putin, who merely responded to that U.S. invasion of Ukraine in the way that was essential for the national security of Russia. In doing so, Russia’s President Putin also was protecting the people who live in Crimea, which is why they passionately wanted this response from him.

Zelenskiy, is more pragmatic than Poroshenko was and eager to end the armed conflict Russia has instigated in Ukraine’s eastern regions.

The Bloomberg-published phrase “the armed conflict Russia has instigated in Ukraine’s eastern regions” refers actually to the Obama-installed new Ukrainian regime’s ethnic cleansing in that region to eliminate as many of the residents there as possible, because 90+% of them had voted for the man whom Obama had just overthrown, Viktor Yanukovych; and, if those voters would still remain inside Ukraine, then Obama’s new Ukrainian regime would easily be voted out of power and would thus quickly end. Obama’s regime didn’t want too many of those voters still to be living there if and when that area, called “Donbass,” would finally become restored to Ukraine and they would become Ukrainian voters again, because that would surely then lead to an end of America’s control over Ukraine. The civilian population in Donbass were specifically targeted. Here’s a map of the election in which Yanukovych became Ukraine’s President, and as you can see there, the far-eastern dark purple area, where Yanukovych received at least 90% of the vote, is the “eastern regions” that refused to be ruled by the Obama-installed Ukrainian regime. The purpose of the newly installed Ukrainian Government’s ethnic cleansing in that area wasn’t only to kill as many people there as they could, but especially to force millions of them to flee across the border into Russia, so that, if and when that region would ever become restored again to Ukrainian control, as many voters as possible who had lived there would either have been killed or else become Russians and resettled in Russia.

Putin will be gone by then, but Russia’s energy trade will be more diversified than when he came to power. More benign Russian governments will be able to use it as a basis for good neighborly relations rather than as an instrument of pressure.

On 27 February 2006, David McClintick headlined a now-classic 20,000-word article in Institutional Investormagazine, “How Harvard lost Russia”, and he detailed there the rape of Russia in the early 1990s, by Lawrence Summers and his Harvard team of corrupt and deceiving economists, whom first Mikhail Gorbachev, and then Boris Yeltsin, naively brought in to guide Russia through the process of transforming from a communist to a capitalist economy. (Those two Russian leaders didn’t understand fascism, and especially not its imperialistic type, such as Harvard and most of its ilk represent.) Basically, Summers, whose entire career has been spent assisting and helping America’s billionaires, selected a team of advisors for this who when they weren’t themselves outright corrupt, were nonetheless incredibly destructive in privatizing Russia’s state-owned assets to Russia’s most corrupt and well-connected insiders, who became billionaires in the process and secreted their newly gained wealth in London and elsewhere, so that the Russian Government’s system of social-welfare benefits and of infrastructure were yanked out from under Russia’s public. Those were the “More benign Russian governments” — the pre-Putin ones — that Bloomberg ‘News’ here praises and wants to replace the Putin-led Government. If you want to see in charts and graphs what the impact upon Russia has been from Putin’s treating as criminals the most-corrupt of those Russian billionaires and his trying to get them to pay the taxes that they had avoided and hid abroad, click here, to see those charts and graphs. As is shown there, Russia’s economy approximately halved between 1990-2000 when Putin became President, who turned this around so that Russia has thrived under his leadership. Bershidsky wants to restore the pre-Putin type of leadership — near-starvation to the Russian masses.

… multiple players — Putin the ambitious authoritarian, his situational allies such as Erdogan and Xi, his adversaries such as the U.S., his reluctant partners such as the EU and his victims such as Ukraine — can combine efforts to build something worthwhile.

Whereas Bloomberg ‘News’ pumps the lie about Putin’s “victims such as Ukraine,” the clear and incontestable reality is that Barack Obama destroyed Ukraine in 2014, and that “The Obama Regime’s Plan to Seize the Russian Naval Base in Crimea” started being implemented by the Obama Administration by no later than June 2013 — well before his coup.

The U.S. was backing an outright racist-fascist, or nazi, operation in Ukraine, as is clearly shown here and here. No one can reasonably assert that today’s America isn’t at least fascist, if not outright nazi (though predominantly anti-Russian instead of anti-Semitic, but any form of racist fascism is nazi ideology, and Obama’s was a form of that: anti-Russian).

So: anyone who places any trust whatsoever in American billionaires’ ‘news’-media is either ignorant or else stupid, because the facts are conclusively the exact opposite, and those media — as is exemplified well in this article from Bloomberg’s Leonid Bershidsky — base their international-‘news’ reporting, and analysis, on what is of benefit to America’s billionaires, instead of to their victims, either at home or abroad. What type of fascists would produce such fascist propaganda? How is it not extreme? It’s an extremist form of capitalism, of the most dangerous type: both racist and imperialist.

—

Even most of the allegedly ‘anti-war’ or ‘progressive’ ‘news’-media in America are actually pro-imperialistic, and the contrary front by them is itself part of their propaganda. Their function is to publish criticism of billionaires and of the Government, but nothing that would encourage any sort of revolution to eliminate the dictators (including their agents) and to replace them by a different system. In the United States, where the existing Constitution is democratic and the Government simply violates it routinely and the corrupt judges after 1970 have employed lies to label these clear violations ‘constitutional’, a revolution would need to eliminate the dictators but not the Constitution. In some other dictatorships, it would need to replace both, and replacing the system would thus have to be more drastic than merely replacing the existing rulers. Fortunately, that’s not necessary in the United States; so, a bloodless revolution could restore America to democracy, though all post-1970 Constitutional rulings would need to be then reviewed by completely changed personnel in the U.S. Supreme Court, for possible reversal. In a bloodless revolution, changing all members would take decades; so, that process would have to start only after all other stages of such a revolution are already completed. It’s possible, but unlikely. America will therefore probably remain a dictatorship by its richest. Though America’s Founders sought not only to eliminate the British aristocracy here, but any subsequent aristocracy from ruling (even an American one) in the United States, America’s richest did rise, after WW-II, to become America’s aristocracy (now called America’s “Deep State”), and the U.S. Constitution will probably remain, and increasingly become, a dead letter here — increasingly lied-about by America’s top Court as it establishes more and more fraudulent precedents, which insult the consensus-intentions of the great men who wrote and signed the Constitution and each one of its Amendments.

America’s Founders warred against not only the British empire but actually against any empire. Even the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 (which is so often cited by American imperialists to ‘justify’ rapes and attempted rapes by the U.S. regime against countries in the Western Hemisphere such as Bolivia and Venezuela) was anti-imperialistic, and simply said that the United States opposed European countries’ efforts to take over countries in the Western Hemisphere. But this Doctrine subsequently became ‘interpreted’ by rising U.S. aristocrats to be instead an authorization for the U.S. government to replace European governments as imperial rulers in other countries of this Hemisphere — yet another historical lie by the aristocracy. American fascism (especially of the imperialistic sort, which is commonly called now “neoconservatism”) is not rooted in the U.S. Constitution; it violates the U.S. Constitution. Our current Government does not represent the United States of America (the U.S. Constitution — “We, the People …” — and that’s all Americans). But it does represent hundreds of today’s Americans, the Deep State, which need to be eliminated and replaced so that this country becomes, again, a democracy.

Other key sources, than the Cockburn-St.-Clair WHITEOUT, in order to understand today’s U.S. Government, are Paul L. Williams’s 2018 Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia; L. Fletcher Prouty’s 2008 The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World;my own 9 September 2019 “How the U.S. Created the Cold War”, and the BBC’s 1992 documentary posted to youtube as “Operation Gladio — Full 1992 documentary BBC”. All of these describe the operation that agents of America’s aristocrats carried out after FDR’s 1945 death, in order, ultimately — with the consciously planned ultimate aim being — to surround Russia by enemies (transforming even its former allies into its enemies), and then to take control over both Russia and China, and thus to become dictators to the entire planet, nullifying U.S. President FDR’s intention, which had been instead for an international democratic federal republic of nations emerging from the U.N. — for the termination, instead of for the culmination, of all imperialisms.

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Eric ZUESSE